v0.116.0-rc4 Lands On Its Feet

Everything in rc3, plus a template where people talk to you, 2D lights that shade relief and shine from one direction, sprites that stretch without stretching their borders, and box-shaped queries for 2D bodies.

Pixel Village: a dialogue box you own

A new template, Pixel Village (floptle new my-game --template village2d, or pick it on the Hub's New project screen). Walk up to someone and press E. Their words type out in a pixel font, inside a box with their portrait, and a question gives you choices to pick with the arrows, the d-pad or E.

None of it is engine: it is scripts/talk.lua, under two hundred lines, and a conversation file per character in data/. Change the words, add a character, or rewrite how it all works. The pixel font is a bitmap font made from the engine's own pixel typeface.

Normal maps on 2D art

Give a sprite's or a tile layer's Material a normal map and 2D lights shade its relief. The side of a bump facing a lamp brightens and the side facing away darkens. A sprite that flips or turns is still lit from the right side. A surface without a normal map lights exactly as before.

Suns and spot lamps in 2D

• Tick sun on a 2D light and it lights everything it reaches from one direction: the way the node's down arrow points. Rotate the node to turn it. Walls throw long shadows away from it. From a script: node:setLighting2D{ sun = true }.
• A lamp with aim it (spot) ticked now shines a cone in 2D too, aimed the same way.

9-slice sprites

Give a sprite's Material a 9-slice border (Inspector ▸ Material ▸ 9-slice, in texture pixels). Then scaling the node stretches the sprite while its corners keep their pixel size and its edges stretch along their length only. One small picture makes a platform, a sign or a window of any size. From a script: node:setMaterial{ slice = 8 }.

Box queries for 2D bodies

• boxcast(origin, dir, halfX, halfY, max) sweeps a box in the 2D plane and returns the first thing it meets. It catches a step lower than the box's middle, which a ray from the centre would pass over, and a box sliding along the floor doesn't hit the floor.
• overlapBox(center, halfX, halfY) lists everything a box overlaps, deepest first.

Particles keep their layer

A particle system on a node with a sorting layer now draws its particles at that layer. Dust kicked up behind the player stays behind the player.

WOFF fonts

.woff fonts work anywhere a font goes. A .woff2 isn't read yet. Use one and the Console tells you how to convert it.

Upgrading

Nothing to do, unless a 2D light already had aim it (spot) ticked. It used to shine all round in a 2D scene whatever that said, and now it shines its cone. Untick it if you want it to shine all round.